SOURCE: Gallagher, Kent G. “The Tragedies of George Henry Boker: The Measure of American Romantic Drama.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 20, no. 3 (1974): 187-215.

[In the following essay, Gallagher discusses Boker's development as a playwright and describes his plays as departures from a specifically American brand of romantic tragedy that celebrated the democratic principles of the new nation.]

Despite the efforts of Arthur Hobson Quinn, Joseph Wood Krutch, and E. Sculley Bradley early in this century,¹ George Henry Boker (1823-1890) has not attained a high place in the history of American letters. His many articles, lengthy sonnet sequence, numerous poems, and ten complete plays remain material mainly for those who would satisfy their literary curiosity about one American Romanticist of the nineteenth century. Only through Francesca da Rimini, Boker's single outstanding accomplishment, has his fame reached the permanently anthologized state.² And there it rests, represented by a play that, in Quinn's words, “marks the climax of romantic tragedy in this country.”³

Boker's Romanticism, however, departs considerably in approach and attitude from the varieties that precede it. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, American Romanticism had focused on distant countries, murky forests, or historic moments largely for purposes of extolling the noble experiment in government. The basic tenets of Romantic drama in America—a belief in natural truth, love, honor, and a rhetorical commitment to passion—often were molded by considerations of patriotism or nationalism. Thus American Romantic tragedy frequently and vociferously avowed Republican principles, employed historic parallels for the still-novel experiment in government by the masses, and sought to dramatize events in the fresh saga of the new world. One of the earliest plays so to do, William Dunlap's André (1798), dealt with a Revolutionary theme, interweaving more than adequately individual action and a topic of national importance. Yet his example did not awaken any durable interest among capable playwrights. As a matter of record, a few years later the demand for cobbled together pop pieces grew great enough so that Dunlap rewrote André as The Glory of Columbia for production on July 4, 1803. The new version included battle scenes, episodes with Washington, and a comic Irish infantryman who discovers that winning at Yorktown will reunite him with the wives he enlisted to escape. It reappeared as part of Independence Day celebrations as late as 1847.⁴ The pastiche burbles with a holiday spirit that replaces dramaturgy with patriotism. But the search for historical epochs in which to set paradigms of democracy—a quest embarked upon by almost all Romantic American playwrights in the first half of the nineteenth century—produced large numbers of tragedies cast in the didactic mold. Robert Montgomery Bird, John Augustus Stone, Robert T. Conrad, Frances Wright, and James Nelson Barker all wrote drama that incorporated more than one element of natural nobility, individual patriotism, revolt against tyranny, or an anachronistic commitment to democracy. Only Barker managed, with a native story about the Puritan period, to avoid freighting his most serious American drama with an overabundance of didacticism.

In order to understand well Boker's position at the time he undertook his four major tragedies, a swift excursion through some earlier American Romantic drama will serve as a guide. Frances Wright's Altorf, produced at New York's Park Theatre, February 19, 1819, while not a tragedy that ranks with those by Bird, Barker, Stone, or Conrad, illustrates clearly the manner in which playwrights grafted topical meaning to the Romantic form. The tragedy occurs in Switzerland and Austria and has at its focus the unhappy love affair between young Altorf, who first leads, then deserts the rebellious Swiss Army, and Rosina, daughter of Count de Rossberg, enemy of the Swiss. The democratic sentiment appears in passages that do not function pivotally to the drama—for like the Capulets and Montagues, the Rossbergs and Altorfs happen to be gentry on either side of a quarrel. Young Altorf and Rosina commit suicide when the Swiss win, for the victory signals the end of their love.

James Nelson Barker's Superstition; or the Frantic Father, first produced at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on March 12, 1824, takes place in late seventeenth-century New England; its subject the operation of religious zealotry in those troubled times.⁵ In the play Charles Fitzroy, the young Englishman, and Mary Ravensworth, a colonist's daughter, love one another during the years when witch hunting preoccupied the Puritans. The historical topic provides a mimetic background against which Barker tells the story of a family whose patriarch, accused of complicity in the death of Charles I, fled to the new country at the Restoration and disappeared. The aged regicide, called The Unknown, saves the colony that fears him as a supernatural being, but intervenes too late to prevent his grandson Charles' death after his unjust conviction for murder, attempted rape, and consorting with the Devil. Barker avoids sententiousness and didacticism, allowing the story to carry his meaning.

The next pair of Romantic verse tragedies were staged two years apart, and both received Edwin Forrest's prize for the best native American drama. The Gladiator, by Robert Montgomery Bird, was produced at the Park Theatre on September 26, 1831, and John A. Stone's Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags first appeared, with Forrest in the title role, at the same theatre on December 15, 1829. Metamora deals with a native theme: how the Indians fought unsuccessfully to maintain the land they believed their patrimony. The play combines two plot lines. One concerns the love of Walter Vaughan and Oceana Mordaunt. Their intentions to wed are frustrated by her father's command that Oceana must marry Lord Fitzarnold to prevent his identifying Mordaunt as a regicide; the other focuses on Metamora (called historically King Philip by Englishmen who wanted to flatter him out of his territories) and his efforts to keep the settlers from overrunning Indian land. He behaves in the traditional manner of the noble savage: after saving Oceana from a panther, he tenders her a feather which she can show for future protection by the Indians. Later in the play Metamora, who stands accused of a trumped up murder, recognizes the Indian who has betrayed him and in his escape kills the traitor. During an ensuing fight Metamora kills Fitzarnold, but the Indians ultimately lose. In the final scene Metamora stabs Nahmeokee, his wife, and as English bullets cut him down defiantly pronounces a curtain speech on the eternal freedom of the Indian.

Robert Montgomery Bird could easily be compared to Boker in literary output and skill as a dramatist. More than any of the early American romantic playwrights, he manipulated rhetorical dialogue and sentiment to forge moving dramas at whose focus of action and interest stood a well characterized protagonist. Bird wrote several plays for Forrest, but received shoddy treatment from the star.⁶The Gladiator celebrates the revolt of the slaves, led by the Thracian Spartacus, against Rome. While Bird wrote the tragedy in the elevated diction characteristic of the era—a rhetoric that sounds falsely pompous to modern ears—he astutely avoided making the play primarily a polemic against tyranny. Spartacus and Pharsarius, his brother, lead the revolt. But they fall out over differences in strategy and the disposition of spoils. Pharsarius, over Spartacus' objections, marches off with a majority of the army to attack Rome. When his legion falls, he escapes the debacle and returns to tell Spartacus of the soldiers' crucifixion. Spartacus then arranges to have his wife and child escorted by Pharsarius to safety, but they are killed in a Roman ambush. Spartacus, who has refused an offer of citizenship in return for his forces, dies while fighting to reach the tent of his arch-enemy, Crassus. The tragedy, true to the type of rhetorical Romanticism required by Forrest, provided a stratum of democratic sentiment on which the personal catastrophies could be played. It suited perfectly the combination of patriotic feeling and muscular heroics which the husky star found most suitable to his talents and personality. His audiences agreed with him, for during his career he played Spartacus several thousand times.⁷

Judge Robert T. Conrad's Jack Cade, or Aylmere as it is variously known, represents that type of tragedy celebrating the common man. Like The Gladiator it deals with the revolt of people held in bondage, this time the Kentish bondsmen whose leader appears in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2.⁸ The play failed to please audiences until Conrad rewrote it for Forrest, who successfully portrayed the hero on May 24, 1841, at New York's Park Theatre—and many times thereafter.⁹ Jack Cade, who takes “God's noble title” of Aylmere to counter aristocracy created by the crown, leads a revolt of Kentish bondsmen in 1450. The tragedy reeks with blood as the rebellion wipes out Cade's family: his mother dies by fire in her cottage, Miriamne, Cade's wife, goes mad after she kills a nobleman who has attacked her, and his child is murdered. Cade himself dies heroically, after having led the rag-tag army successfully into London. The essentials of American Romantic tragedy appear again in this work: the love story doomed by the insensitive and dishonorable behavior of the privileged few, the commoner-hero motivated by democratic sentiments and idealism, and the chance to pronounce speeches extolling the benefits of a classless society where nature provides the only differences among men.

Boker could not have missed seeing many Romantic plays similar to those described above. Indeed, Forrest, Ingersoll, and others performed frequently in Philadelphia. The city had three fine theatres during the forties and fifties: the Chestnut, the Walnut, and the Arch Street. Moreover, New York and Philadelphia constituted two of the main centers of culture in the United States. Young Boker, who had a reputation as a socialite of substance and discernment, cultivated friends among the writers and actors of the period. His assiduous study of literature and his early attempts to write—some poetry and criticism appearing in 1842 and 1843, his first volume of poetry, The Lesson of Life, completed by 1847, and his first play published in 1848—demonstrate an activity and interest that would have sent him not only to the classics but also to those works published by Americans. His statement concerning the uses of the classics in a letter to his friend, Richard H. Stoddard, indicates four authors whom he revered, as well as it reveals the basis for his choice of subject matter:

Read Chaucer for strength, read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age as far as you can.¹⁰

Consciously, then, he strove to write plays and poems that would not suffer from the kind of parochialism that grafted chauvinism onto literature. Bradley quotes a stanza from one of Boker's poems that epitomizes the author's attitudes toward his subject matter:

Not for myself, but for art
          I claim all ages, every clime;
And I shall scorn the lines that part
          Country from country, time from time.(11)

Boker remained true to this broad view of literature, for his four major tragedies, as well as his other plays, avoid the clichés of nationalism so prevalent in the efforts at high drama that preceded his.

Boker composed all but one of his ten plays and a fragment between 1847 and 1857.¹² By 1848, the year that saw his first volume of poetry in print, Boker had completed the initial draft of his earliest tragedy, Calaynos. Samuel Phelps pirated it for a production in London, at Sadler's Wells Theatre on May 10, 1849. Boker revised that version for the first American performance, staged by J. E. Murdoch on January 20, 1851 at the Walnut Street Theatre. By September 1849, Anne Boleyn was complete. It never was produced. Next came two comedies, The Betrothal, finished in March 1850, and The World a Mask, completed by December 21 of the same year. They both found a cast and a production within six months of completion. Another comedy, The Widow's Marriage, followed in September 1852. The manager of the Walnut Street Theatre accepted it for performance but could find no actress to portray the female lead.¹³ Between the first of September and November 14, 1852, Boker conceived and created Leonor de Guzman, his third tragedy, which was produced on October 3, 1853, at the Walnut Street Theatre. The next play, Don Pedro of Castile, was to have been a sequel to Leonor. Boker wrote the first two acts probably early in 1853 but never completed the play. His most significant tragedy, Francesca da Rimini, he set to paper in nineteen days before March 21, 1853,¹⁴ but had to wait until September 26, 1855, for its first production at the Broadway Theatre in New York. It then received fourteen performances in New York, Philadelphia, and on tour. E. L. Davenport undertook the play, assuming the role of Lanciotto, the misshapen hero. Francesca Boker followed with his only play focused on a contemporary topic, The Bankrupt. Completed sometime after March of 1853, it concerns a villain's attempt to avenge himself on those whom he thought had taken advantage of him. The play, a standard melodrama, was produced on December 3, 1855. Boker wrote one other unproduced tragedy, Königsmark, before he ceased playwriting in 1857. Between that year and 1885, when he began work on Nydia, he devoted himself to business, public affairs, and his sonnet sequence of 314 poems.¹⁵

I

Acknowledging Francesca da Rimini as Boker's most important contribution to American drama—that which stands at the pinnacle of American verse tragedy, no matter how high or low that summit in relation to other literary attainments—one may inquire into the nature of the three tragedies that preceded it. Bradley maintains that Boker's first full-length play, Calaynos, “is worthy of a place among the poet's greatest plays, powerfully exemplifying his sense of dramatic structure and his ability to write blank verse of a high order. Calaynos is not a promise; it is an accomplishment.”¹⁶ But the tragedy reveals only a few of the high poetic and dramatic abilities needed for Francesca. It tells much more about the early attempts of a committed playwright. The play also marks a departure from the established “democratic” convention of Romantic American tragedy. Although the question of government surfaces several times, it never arises as crucial to any of Boker's four major tragedies. His work therefore differs from other Romantic plays of the period which also had patrician heroes, for they all followed the dictates of the genre. Yet many of their patricians respond to some prototype of American democracy. Boker's four tragedies can be called patrician insofar as the protagonists are noble and do not deal in partisan attitudes toward democracy. And partially because of that approach each play maintains a much more unified focus than many of the other democratic tragedies. Government as an aristocratic institution Boker takes for granted, his interest lying in the nature of the tragic protagonist.

In each of the four tragedies one character towers above all others, his or her traits providing the center of dramatic interest. Yet, as Boker discovered by the time he had completed Anne Boleyn, the ability to create a character, no matter how complete, comprises but one part of playwriting. The difference between the focus of Calaynos and that of American patriotic tragedy is as great as the difference between the structures of Calaynos and Francesca. Only in a few particulars does the first play show any signs that would indicate the grasp of language, characterization, and techniques of playwriting sufficient to forecast a Francesca da Rimini.

The first version of Calaynos appeared in an edition published by E. H. Butler in 1848, and subsequently pirated by Phelps. The actor liberally doctored the play, much to Boker's dismay. But the result ran for more than forty consecutive days at Sadler's Wells.¹⁷ Although in 1853 Boker complained mightily to his friend Stoddard about the revisions Phelps made,¹⁸ he incorporated many of those in preparing the play for the James E. Murdoch production of 1851 and used them again in 1886 when Lawrence Barrett contemplated producing it.¹⁹ For the purpose here of charting the advancements in playwriting, the 1848 manuscript as it appears in the 1856 edition of Plays and Poems shall be used. There we see the poet beginning to struggle with those problems presented by the dramatic form—a struggle that he would wage more successfully than any other Romantic dramatist of his century writing in English.

Calaynos concerns the fortunes of a Spanish nobleman with some Moorish blood who has married a pure Castilian. Studious, he compiles a philosophical tome to encompass all the great thoughts of mankind; he believes in the inherent goodness of all men and runs an estate on which peasants labor happily. The nobleman, Calaynos, is about to leave for Seville where he must swear fealty to the king. The duty had previously been carried out by deputy, for an old tradition stated that, “When a Calaynos shall go to Seville, / Then sure that Calaynos shall go to ill.” His wife Alda, who is bored by life on the estate, begs to accompany him. But he refuses on the grounds that the wickedness of the city and court would displease her. Despite the protests of his secretary, Oliver, and an ancient friar acting as a seer, Calaynos sets out for Seville. There, in addition to swearing allegiance to his sovereign, he intends to help a childhood friend whom he has heard the money-lenders press. He rescues the man, Don Luis, and returns with him to the castle.

Calaynos repairs instantly to his studies, and Luis, who has wenched and gambled away his money, tries to seduce Alda. Rebuffed, Luis tricks Alda into meeting him late one night. He informs her of Calaynos' Moorish blood, and when she faints, abducts her. Calaynos discovers her flight, and although he suspects she has gone willingly, sends Oliver to Seville to learn what he can. In the interim Calaynos agonizes. As Oliver returns, Alda whimpers at the gate, enters, and dies. Calaynos, having learned how shabbily Luis treated Alda, rides once again to Seville, challenges Luis, and dies of a fatal wound after having killed his enemy.

In the prologue, Boker indicates his awareness of the differences between narrative and dramatic characterization:

Arcadian virtue and Arcadian crime,
In abstract form, may crowd the Epic clime;
But 'tis the Drama's task to show,
Where bad or good alternate gloom or glow—
Where in each mind are various passions fixed;
Virtue with vice, and vice with virtue mixed.

But Calaynos exists for most of the five acts on an abstract plane, motivated by traits of contemplation, although passion rules him during the last act. Boker also points out in the prologue that he intends the play to pivot on the issue of race hatred.

Our plot turns on the loathing which they feel,
Who draw their spotless race from proud Castile,
Of the hot blood which fires the Moorish vein.
No time can reconcile, no deed abate,
For that one stain, the haughty Spaniard's hate:
As the sound man the loathesome leper shuns,
So pass Castilians by Granada's sons.

The plot so turns only to a minute degree. Calaynos' failure to inform Alda of his ancestry makes it possible for Luis to abduct her. But the bulk of the tragedy has nothing to do with that theme, nor does the final resolution.²⁰

More at the fount of Calaynos' acts is that studied philosophical beneficence that blinds him to any possible evil. It may be that Boker intended his protagonist to have sought the contemplative life in reaction to the “hot blood that fires the Moorish vein.” But the matter never crops up in Calaynos' countless soliloquies. The tragedy depends upon Calaynos' own proclivity for solitude as much as it does on the fact of his Moorish ancestry. Had he not been so inherently naive—and indeed he refuses to heed his more worldly secretary's warnings about Luis—he would not have brought his childhood friend to his castle.

The manner in which Boker carries out the characterizations, though, presents problems. Abstractions work best, even in Romantic verse tragedy, when rendered concrete through agents who undertake dramatic actions. Calaynos, however, overflows with soliloquies. In them agents reveal over and over again those emotions that should spur their actions. Yet in working out all those introspective speeches, Boker relies almost exclusively on polarized, overly simplified abstractions. For example, in a short section of a longer speech, Luis describes himself as one who, cursed by fate and nature, has abandoned all vestiges of morality. His self-awareness functions at a very rudimentary level, linked loosely to his immediate action.

                                                            I have left the path
Which leads to good, so far from where I stand,
That all return is worse than hopeless now.
.....It cannot be, I was not formed for good;
To what fate orders, I must needs submit;
The sin not mine, but His who framed me thus—
Not in my will, but in my nature lodged.
Formed as I am, I have no choice of fate;
But must achieve the purpose of my being.

His villainy, of course, motivates his behavior at Calaynos' estate. Although Luis disavows any will to good, he never ties his evil nature to a goal worthy of such villainy. His knowledge of his own nature never surfaces in a well-worked-out action until he abducts Alda, as, for example, Edmund's speech in favor of bastardy leads immediately to his success in gulling Gloucester. By the time Luis prepares for the revelation to Alda, he has been too long inactive.

The method of characterization in Calaynos thus aligns the agents with straightforward virtue or unalloyed vice. The soliloquy quoted above occurs when Luis finds that Calaynos has arrived in Seville. His servant, Soto, hurries off to prepare a reception for the country Don, while Luis ponders aloud. Boker intends the speech to round out Luis, to swell him beyond melodramatic villainy where evil actions seem self-generated. The higher motivation, then, Boker frames in overly simplified theology. Such abstractions reduce drama to mere narrative. There would be no problem were it a matter of being informed of Luis' motives in soliloquy, a convention of Romantic verse tragedy that has been effectively employed as late as mid-twentieth century. But when characters introduce themselves by pondering a serious matter quite removed from the pressing issue (Luis also asserts, in the same speech, “He is a fool, who acts not for himself; / A worse than fool who chases airy virtue”), credibility decreases.

Boker similarly strives to create in Calaynos a tragic protagonist whose goodness and altruism make his ethics irreproachable. Yet the traits appear too heavily drawn too soon. Early in the play, when answering Luis' argument that those with wealth can afford to be generous and kind while the rest of the world must pinch each coin given in charity, Calaynos replies:

Luis, you know not of the years I've spent,
In patient study and unwearying search
To learn the wants of man. I have digged down
Into the very roots and springs of things:
All moral systems, all philosophies,
All that the poet or historian wrote,
All hints from lighter books, all common sayings,—
The current coin of wisdom 'mong mankind,—
Time-hallowed truths, and lies which seem like truths,
I have turned o'er before my mental eye,
Seeking a guide to lead me on to good;
And find the chiefest springs of happiness
Are faith in Heaven, and love to all mankind.

The hundred springs of action Boker reduces to two: a belief in the inherent goodness of all men, bolstered by an unblinking faith in literal and beneficent divinity—hardly the result of very profound scholarship. Boker's Romantic predilection for rendering his characterizations in the extremes of good and evil causes all of Calaynos' speeches—until Luis abducts Alda—to assume the cast of moral sermons. As Alda complains, he constitutes an ambulatory exemplum of self-controlled rectitude:

Thus comes he ever with that thoughtful brow;
Thus goes he ever with that calm, cold mien;
Thus would he ever be, thus passionless,
If all the world were hissing in his face.

In order to determine why Boker made Calaynos a moral prude, one needs examine the crux of the drama. To create significant tragedy, a protagonist must undertake some course of action that will utilize his moral nature in a pivotal manner. The only qualities essential to Calaynos' action through the first four acts place him on a plane of philosophical inquiry far removed from active participation in the drama. Those qualities also blind him to the possibility of an evil act affecting him. For instance, Calaynos refuses to listen to any of Oliver's suspicions, either in Seville or later on the estate. He asserts, to paraphrase: Even if Luis is evil, he can only hurt me in my purse, and that is ample. Calaynos also consistently refuses to observe human interaction. Twice Alda bewails his lack of interest in daily affairs and wonders why she loves him so deeply. The faithful Oliver Calaynos finally drives away because he has had the temerity to suspect Luis of being other than completely reformed. Moreover, Boker's own insistence in the prologue on the centrality of the Moorish issue misleads the critic. Both Bradley and Quinn find that issue at the heart of the tragedy.²¹ Yet Boker does not show Calaynos in opposition to a social law, except in the final scene of the play, when he realizes what means Luis used to abduct Alda. True, the existence of the social code brings about his self-realization as well as his death, but it does not function in an action undertaken by Calaynos and crucial to his tragic awakening. Yet in all fairness, it must be admitted that the construction of the play allows conclusions such as Bradley's and Quinn's to be drawn. Boker does not yet know well enough how to manipulate his form. He exaggerates some elements—the philosophical disquisitions—out of proportion, and reduces others—Alda's discontent, which would have been useful had Luis played upon it at greater length—to a size belying their importance to the overall movement of the action.

Boker has created a tragedy of personal error. Calaynos does not fly against the social mores so much as he ignores the fact that every man is part intellect and part emotion. Calaynos, like Euripides' Hippolytus, denies one aspect of his duality—which brings on the tragedy. His flaw becomes apparent at the crucial point in the drama, when Luis abducts Alda. Calaynos has just finished rhapsodizing about the wonders of the universe, comparing man's puniness to nature's immensity. Shortly he will fill his cosmos with the agony of passion and anger. When a forester wounded by Luis reports, Calaynos' blood mounts. He pleads:

O god, forgive—
Forgive my impious rage! Withhold thy frown,
Till I have sifted to the very dust,
This hideous matter!

But he can no longer reason dispassionately. As his anger reaches a peak he suddenly realizes what has happened to him:

O, Alda, Alda, thoughts of thee come back,
And drive all speculation from my brain!
Why here I am, who thought to will to do,
Who thought I'd schooled my passion as a child,
Raving at heaven o'er one of life's poor wrongs!
How brave, how brave in me to teach long suffering,
And, when I suffer, shrink without a tug!
O Alda, Alda, never love thee more,
Never behold thee, never call thee mine!—
I have a heart that mocks philosophy;
Burst forth, my heart—I'm but a man at last.

Calaynos' will, so strong in comparison to Luis' weak nature, gives way in the fifth act to his passion. While awaiting Oliver's return from Seville, he soliloquizes emotionally. Soon Oliver enters, and close on his heels come servants carrying Alda. After she dies Calaynos departs for Seville, there to receive his fatal wound. He pays for his onesidedness, as do Alda and Luis.

The major changes in the script, some made by Phelps and some by Boker thirty-seven years later, cause the action to occur more swiftly. Basically, the revised play begins more rapidly, and Calaynos meets Luis at court, where the gambler has been brought on criminal charges. Luis learns from Calaynos of the Moorish blood, and when he meets Alda without having the rendezvous arranged for ahead of time, the combination of Luis' knowledge and his opportunism make him more completely a villain. One of the greatest dramatic oversights in the original script has Alda's death offstage in order to provide Calaynos scope for his elegy. He bemoans fate, then rushes into the antechamber at her death cry. The acting version rectifies the scene by having Alda breathe her last on stage.²²

But the earlier edition offers the best means for assessing Boker's advancing dramatic abilities. It shows him focusing primarily upon the development of characterization to the neglect of a dramatically effective plot. Yet the characterizations do not ring true primarily because they are too closely tied to extremes of good and evil, making the drama more didactic than mimetic. The sententiousness of the diction adds to this abstraction, and when it is combined with Boker's tendency to provide too much information in each extended passage—he relies primarily on the duet, even shifting two characters awkwardly forward while two others stand at the rear of the stage—interest rapidly wanes.

Yet the problems in this first of Boker's plays should not detract from his real accomplishments. First, to have written a tragedy in which the verse, although frequently contrived and forced, shows substantial poetic ability is noteworthy. Second, the piece, while it often sags dramaturgically, possesses some excellent scenes. Especially during the comic exchanges between Soto and Martina—Luis' and Alda's servants—does Boker offer an indication of the talent that will soon emerge. Furthermore, not all of Calaynos' soliloquies and speeches function as exegetic commentary on points in Christian theology. Some are wrought in poetry that stirs the senses in response to the situation and the language. Calaynos' finest speech occurs immediately after Alda has died; and despite its essentially static nature, it demonstrates Boker's talent with verse.

                                                                                                                                                      Oliver,
I stole to see her; not a soul was there,
Save an old crone that hummed a doleful tune,
And winked her purblind eyes, o'errun with tears.
O, boy, I never knew I loved her so!
I held my breath, and gazed into her face—
Ah, she was wondrous fair. She seemed to me,
Just as I've often seen her, fast asleep,
When from my studies cautiously I've stolen,
And bent above her, and drunk up her breath,
Sweet as a sleeping infant's—Then perchance,
Yet in her sleep, her starry eyes would ope,
To close again behind their fringy clouds,
Ere I caught half their glory. There's no breath now,
There's not a perfume on her withered lips,
Her eyes ope not, nor ever will again.—

The playwright also captures the crux of tragedy; he centers the action on the moral traits of his protagonists, causing the catastrophe to spring from an act that has its source deep within Calaynos' nature. Perhaps Joseph Wood Krutch arrives at the most judicious assessment of Boker's accomplishment. He says, “… in the first play he [Boker] already shows, in a marked degree, two of his most striking characteristics: ability to tell a highly colored story effectively, and a remarkable aptness of phrase which he utilized for both tragic and comic effect.”²³

II

Boker worked for nine months on his second play, Anne Boleyn, completing it by September 1849.²⁴ While it never received a production, one of the manuscripts, in a hand different from Boker's, divides the play into parts, giving cue lines for each speech—evidence of preparation for acting. Furthermore, Quinn paraphrases a letter from Boker to Stoddard dated September 5, 1849, in which the playwright mentions that he had been approached by the Haymarket Theatre about producing Anne.²⁵ In that same letter Boker mentions that the American star, Charlotte Cushman, had assured him she would be responsible for mounting and performing the play.²⁶ Yet despite these two indications that the play was seriously considered for staging, no records confirm its appearance before an audience.

As might be conjectured from the title, Boker sets the play in the period when Henry's interest in Jane Seymour has begun to turn his head. The play opens with a conclave consisting of Norfolk, Suffolk, Exeter, Arundel, and Richmond, all but one of whom seeks to depose Anne because she has been interfering too successfully in affairs of state. Soon Norfolk, the leader of Anne's opposition, learns that Henry has begun to tire of his current queen. Jane Seymour has caught the roving royal eye. From that moment to the end of the play, Anne becomes more and more entangled in the false and circumstantial evidence Norfolk and his crew trump up. First Loney, one of Norfolk's underlings, discovers an egotistical groom of the queen's who, drunken, offers the conspirators their initial invention. They force Smeaton, the groom, to confess that he has indulged in adulterous relations with Anne. But such an allegation palpably could not hold up, so the prosecutors turn to Henry Norris, Rochford (Anne's brother), Brereton, and Weston, whom they accuse of the same crime as Smeaton. Anne, who has been suffering weeks of uncertainty, finds herself locked in the Tower. Thomas Wyatt, her staunchest supporter, attempts to free her, but Anne refuses to permit a general rebellion in her favor. It would disrupt the kingdom. Finally, the trial over and the trumped-up evidence accepted, the tribunal sentences Anne to the block. Noble to the last and forgiving of all, she mounts and kneels as the curtain falls.

The plot outline does not adhere to the kind of Romantic tragedy consisting of action rising to a climax, but rather depicts Anne's ever-dwindling freedom. In reality, her situation is bad from the outset, for the cabal has decided to do all it can to remove her influence from the government. Each new incident throws more of a shadow over Anne until she disappears into the Tower. The plot, then, differs from that of Calaynos in that it hinges on suffering. Calaynos suffered only after he discovered Alda's abduction and his own change of disposition. Anne incurs increased restriction throughout the play. We see her but briefly during the first act, when her power and certitude suffer their initial decline. From that time until the last line of the play, each fresh incident twists the ropes. This type of tragedy presents an author more obstacles to surmount than the first kind undertaken by Boker; the playwright must construct a protagonist of such attractiveness and depth that the audience will not waver in attachment. After the first act, Boker does not manage to enliven or vary Anne's suffering. Indeed, the span of time encompassed by Anne strains the capabilities of the form. One grows too accustomed to watching the situation worsen and the protagonist writhe.

One must keep in mind that between the publication of Calaynos and the completion of Anne, Boker had no opportunity to view a performance of his first play. He did not even know that Phelps had mounted the pirated version. The first American production of Calaynos, moreover, would not come until January 21, 1851. Boker therefore lacked the indispensable experience of learning how his drama would play. For any dramatist, no matter how well he may grasp the form of earlier plays, still needs to discover for himself what is dramatic and what can be altered when words are spoken and deeds done by living actors. In short, Boker still labored in the closet, his art untried.

Yet in spite of this disadvantage, Anne shows some strong advances over Calaynos. The first scene of Anne indicates the most significant change in playwriting. Calaynos opens with a misleading and lugubriously comic episode between two servants who plant the first foreshadowing seed about their master's trip to Seville. The action then moves to another protracted duet between Alda and Calaynos. Anne opens with five angry peers of England striding into a chamber, heatedly discussing a turn of events that affects them all. The dialogue, moreover, moves in sprightly measure, providing information and conflict, argument and wit.

DUKE of Norfolk.
Nay, Nay, my lords, affairs must not stand thus.
She is my kinswoman, and I confess,
If but on my estate her influence bore,
I'd pass it unchecked. No private griefs
Should wring a word from me, nor tutor me
To raise the hand that snaps a natural tie.
But see, My lords—
DUKE of Suffolk.
'Ods blood! we have seen enough!
We have been open-eyed, your grace of Norfolk.
I trust we hold one mind.
ALL.
                                                                                                                        We do, we do.
SUFFOLK.
Why then your grace, we have stared ourselves stone blind,
Stared all our man to palsied impotence
At this she-basilisk. Some years ago,
From the mere dregs and offscourings of your house,
We saw this girl emerge, and step by step
Crawl slowly upward to the top of power—
Why, she was queen before her crown was on!—
Till, now she threatens us from such a throne
Of downright rule as queen ne'er beheld before.
Nay, pucker not your brows, good Duke of Richmond
While conscience echoes what I bluntly speak:
Your royal father, more than any here,
Has felt her deadly witchcraft.
DUKE of Richmond.
                                                                                                                                  Fie, for shame!
I thought this meeting one of policy:
It never crossed me that five stalwart men
Had leagued their brains to gabble scandal thus
Of a poor queen, whose sole discovered crime—
Is too much beauty.

In the space of twenty-eight lines Boker has informed his audience that Norfolk's kinswoman has upset the councillors, that what she has done is of such importance that the cabinet stands on its ears, that she sprang from humble origins, and that Richmond thinks the councillors a pack of scandal-mongers. The political motive will operate throughout the tragedy, providing more than the inconstancy of a headstrong monarch as the cause of Anne's fall. The exposition, moreover, occurs through demonstrative action and argument and raises questions about the woman who has brought it all about. As the scene progresses, curiosity increases, for the argument between Richmond and the conspirators waxes.

Richmond continues in the same vein: he has little sympathy for the other councillors and, through his consistently sharp-witted rebuttals, tends to enlist audience sympathy for the queen. Yet Boker does not once slip into a less dramatic mode. The entire first scene in Anne takes the form of a heated exchange, the excellence of which stems not only from differences of opinion when cabinet members meet to discuss means to take power from a queen, but also from the pungent commentary of Richmond. Later Richmond reveals to the other cabinet members that the queen might fall from favor assisted only by their sovereign's inconstancy, after which all the nobles save Richmond vow to remove Anne from her position.

Thus, in one very engaging episode Boker completely prepares the audience for further action. The ensuing scene introduces Henry chasing Jane Seymour—and the two of them flirt for seventy-four lines as Jane teases Henry into promising to marry her. Then, once Boker has both defined and shown the danger to Anne, he introduces the protagonist. Her entrance has been delayed until curiosity calls for it.

In Henry's chambers the next morning, Norfolk and the king converse. Henry reveals that he has been uneasy in conscience during the evening and Norfolk, in several needless asides, discloses that the last time Henry was so smitten Catharine was sacrificed to Anne. Anne arrives and forces her way past the usher, whom Henry dismisses angrily for having permitted her entrance. The queen then asks Henry for a favorable decision concerning the plight of some beleaguered German Protestants. She and Norfolk engage in a heated argument, and the men finally depart. Anne shakes off doubt, concluding that she shines at her noon of power, for the courtiers who cross upstage bow obsequiously to her. Boker seeks to make Anne a sympathetic agent by providing her with a worthy religious cause, thus drawing attention away from her past campaign to replace Catharine in Henry's affections. Boker's improved grasp of dramaturgy shows throughout the first act. Only in the final scene does he slip seriously, allowing his characters unnecessary asides that convey information available through the action. Also, in what ominously foreshadows Anne's later inactivity, the end of the act endures for two needless and overly-long soliloquies intended to establish Anne's thoughtful bent—which will come into play later. The act closes on a note of ironic optimism, since Anne does not know that her hold on the throne has begun to slip.

One regrets that the final four acts do not vindicate the promise of the first. The play dwindles to a series of pathetic soliloquies interspersed with only isolated scenes indicative of Boker's growing strength. But in several of those scenes, Boker's second substantial advance in playwriting appears: his ability to create vivid characters. Contrary to what might be expected, this liveliness is not manifest in the protagonist, but rather in the secondary characters. Henry in particular is well depicted as the monarch whose whims cost the lives of two queens, and whose lecherousness controls the affairs of state. Only once during the several episodes involving the king does Henry utter a speech comparable to the drawn-out self-revelatory soliloquies of Boker's earlier play. Yet even when that passage occurs, Boker checks Henry short of exposing a self-knowledge too great for one whose life has been devoted to indulgence. By the third act the king has solidified his intent to get rid of Anne. He lacks but the means. Immediately following the scene in which Smeaton confesses under torture to having committed adultery with Anne, Henry appears alone. One time only does Boker slip and permit the casuist king a few verses which, given his already established character, he should not utter:

                                                                                          There's not a let
As far as reason's straining eye can pierce,
To the career which sin points out for me.

The rest of the soliloquy fits Henry, and Boker's improved diction prevents any accusation of abstraction:

My love goes smoothly.—Hum! and yet 't is strange,
When not within the circle of my eyes—
That drink her beauties like the thirsting sands,
And bear the hot thrill of her loveliness
Into my very soul—how this same fever,
That fiercely glowed erewhile, calms and is cooled.

Anne now arrives, having slipped in through a secret passage Henry once used to enter her chamber. At first the king reacts coldly to her. He demands to know if she has anything to confess of her sins, having learned from Suffolk and Anne's sister-in-law of her supposed adultery. She denies all the slander so passionately and so well that Henry repents, calling the reports “the light mintage of some idle tongue.” That settled, Anne bids anew for his love. She pictures the days when he rode to woo her:

How have I changed?—O, Henry, you have changed
From that true Henry who, in bygone days,
Rode, with the hurry of a northern gale,
Towards Hever's heights, and ere the park was gained,
Made the glad air a messenger of love,
By many a blast upon your hunting horn.

Henry acquiesces and Anne departs, certain that she has smoothed over their differences. Henry then breaks into a soliloquy complaining of pampered appetites, the curse of kings. It is well placed, for Jane enters and immediately perceives that Henry has slipped away from her. Using all her wiles she succeeds in recapturing him; from the poignant scene with Anne, Henry arrives swiftly at a passionate intent to rid himself of his queen. In these two episodes his character appears clearly as we see him indecisively vacillating between Anne and his desire. Weak-willed passion spurs his decision, needing no long and wordy explanation, for its operation has been amply demonstrated. The turning point in the tragedy—that portion of it depending on Henry's resolution—takes place during this scene. In the ensuing acts Anne's part in the play diminishes to a series of extended speeches delivered on subjects ranging from her loss of control over destiny to guilt for having taken part in Catharine's fall.

One of the methods Boker employs to maintain as much as possible the uncertainty of Anne's fortunes involves her popularity with the people of England. Even Henry exclaims about the fickle nature of the commoners who first cried against Anne, then grew to love her. In the fourth act Boker takes advantages of the situation to have Thomas Wyatt, in love with Anne and her staunchest supporter, pronounce a thirty-six line speech against tyranny. It begins, “O, coming shape of English liberty, / Have my desires played wanton to mine ears, / Or do I hear the faint prophetic sound / Of thy approaching footsteps echoing through / The mists of coming time?” Framed as an angry exclamation against the order of life that prevents a man of any station from functioning freely, the speech represents Boker's sole effort to provide a democratic comparison in a play otherwise free from such anachronisms. The tragedy, however, contains many references to the disadvantages of monarchy—particularly one whose anointed sovereign acts in such an arbitrary and unchecked manner. Yet these comparisons remain, for the most part, subordinate to the requirements of character and action. Although the opportunity to orate on democracy presents itself frequently in a tragedy whose action occurs during the reign of England's least politic monarch, Boker adheres to the main object: the development of a tragic protagonist whose suffering provides the focus of attention.

Given Boker's obvious interest in characterization and language, Anne Boleyn is a logical second step in his efforts to learn the craft of playwriting. What could afford his narrative ability greater scope than a tragedy of suffering? But he miscalculated the lengths to which the form could be extended. From the moment Henry decides that he will marry Jane, Anne's fortunes decline and she suffers unrelievedly, although she does not enter the Tower until the fifth act. Despite the promise shown in the lively opening scene, in Henry's characterization, and in the episodes where the baser characters appear, the play as a whole does not succeed. But the improvements augur well—and Boker would soon see his characters come to life upon a stage.

III

Between Anne Boleyn and his next tragedy, Boker wrote three comedies, the first two of which and Calaynos were produced in 1850 and 1851. Bayard Taylor, writing to Boker on December 4, 1850, said: “I saw the last night of the ‘Betrothal’ in New York. It is even better as an acting play than I had anticipated, but was very badly acted. I have heard nothing but good of it, from all quarters.”²⁷ Boker's experiences with the problems of preparing a play for presentation furnished the knowledge that accounts for the great improvement in concept, structure, and execution of Leonor de Guzman over Anne.

The play takes place in Spain during the wars against the Moors. In 1350 and 1351 Alfonso XII, king of Castile and Leon, besieged the Moors in Gibraltar. Leonor, his mistress, holds court in Medina Sidonia. The curtain rises upon two hoary old warriors who roughly jostle one another and complain of the courtly life required of them these days. The remainder of the first act depicts Leonor in her power. She manipulates the reins of government while Alfonso struggles with the Moors. But soon the army returns bearing the body of the king, dead of the plague. The fickle court begins in ones and twos to slip back to Seville, where live Alfonso's legal wife and heir, Maria and Pedro. Leonor vows to follow her liege's bier to Seville to see him buried.

The second act opens in Seville. Maria, whose life has been lived on the lees of Alfonso's great affair, swears mortal vengeance against Leonor. Alburquerque, a chancellor in name only until Alfonso's death, places Leonor in protective custody. There she works out and consummates a plan to wed her son Enrique to the heiress of a powerful duchy. Alburquerque, continually striving to prevent just such a union, also seeks to avenge himself on Leonor. Maria hoodwinks Pedro, who has shown charity to Leonor and extended her his protection, and goes to murder her rival. She succeeds, although she does not gain the satisfaction of bringing Leonor to repent her alliance with Alfonso. Alburquerque arrives in time to hear Leonor prophesy that he, Pedro, and Maria will all suffer a reversal of fortune.

In both conception and construction this tragedy towers over its two predecessors. The characters in Leonor are more completely drawn, more lifelike, and less abstract than most of those in Anne and Calaynos. Moreover, as can be judged from the sketch of the story in the previous paragraphs, Boker combines the two kinds of plot he employed in the earlier tragedies. In Calaynos the plot hinged on a reversal of the protagonist's fortune, which led to the hard knowledge that he had depended too much on the volumes lining his library. The plot of Anne, on the other hand, followed the progressively worsening straits in which Anne found herself. In Leonor the reversal occurs at the end of the first act. Yet despite the outward similarity between this tragedy and Anne, a decided improvement in construction has taken place. Leonor appears at the height of her power, holding court, dealing subtly with a wily rebel minister, dazzling all who behold her swift mind and magnetic beauty. Boker moves the action back far enough at the outset of Leonor so that no matter what she may suffer in the action to come, her magnificence will be remembered. Rather than offering introspection through soliloquy during too many of the opening scenes, the playwright has learned to keep action swift and events building until the change in fortune occurs. To see Leonor act with decisiveness and conviction, then stoically bear the news of her lover's death and the realization of her own instant plunge from power, is to know that Leonor's ability to control her fate may be temporarily stymied but always potent.

While the situations at the close of the first acts of Anne and Leonor seem almost identical—in each the fortune of a romantic and well-endowed queen changes—the differences signify how far Boker has progressed dramaturgically. At the same point in Calaynos, the audience knew only that the protagonist journeyed to Seville to meet a probable misfortune; there were no pressing dramatic questions to be answered. The technique for Anne differed markedly, since the play opened with a lively argument, then progressed to the first perils to her station. Boker, through aligning too much opposition against Anne, created certainty rather than doubt. In the third tragedy, buoyed by a superb and decisive woman, the action moves ahead to a future filled with danger, but one through which, if foreshadowing counts for aught in drama, Leonor will choose her way well.

She finds two worthy enemies in Seville. Maria and Alburquerque scheme to remove her. Maria wants simple revenge for having suffered so many years while Leonor usurped her role and position. Alburquerque sees in Leonor an enemy to his plans for solidifying all the power behind Pedro. The strength of the Guzmans, which Leonor has striven so well to increase, must be sapped before vengeance can be savored. By the end of the second act Leonor has promised Alburquerque a battle, Maria's passion has burst upon the imprisoned woman and may again erupt, and the chancellor's ability to work harm has been foreshadowed by his easy manipulation of the king. The rest of the drama proceeds in two opposing directions: Alburquerque schemes to unite Castile under Pedro while Leonor strives to marry Enrique to Juana, heiress to powerful Biscay. The outcome depends on the counterplans of the two opponents. Leonor must get her son married to her ward before Alburquerque arrives to remove Juana.

The first time the chancellor threatens, Leonor thwarts him by demanding to see a warrant he obviously does not have. The next time he appears, the two young people have already entered the chapel (Enrique has found the misplaced contract Alfonso signed). Leonor must stop Alburquerque again. She drops to her knees and appears to be confessing. He leaves, then stealthily returns, to overhear Leonor asking forgiveness for having entertained suspicions of the chancellor's intentions. Alburquerque again departs for a few moments, to reappear with troops and the warrant for Juana's removal. At the final moment Alburquerque flings Leonor bodily aside in his anger and haste to get at the chapel. The soldiers force the door, the organ peals, and into the room walk a radiant couple. Leonor steps toward them and faints.

This act, the fourth, shows how well Boker has learned to work with episodes exciting, integral to plot and character, and symmetrical in artistic design. The first act shows Leonor regnant; the third Leonor enchained; the fourth Leonor triumphant. The second act depicts primarily the power of her enemies, and the fifth, of course, will reveal the manner of her death. When Alburquerque attempts to force Juana away from Leonor, the manner in which Boker manipulates suspense by maintaining uncertainty about the outcome of Leonor's plan demonstrates how far he has come from the steady and episodic development of Calaynos. The play presents, moreover, a vital woman, active though imprisoned. Leonor does control her fate in the face of events that should stymie her. She manages what neither Anne nor Calaynos could.

And finally, her death. In Act V Alburquerque has the kingdom in his control. Enrique is pursued but escapes. Maria, because she fears that the chancellor, in his hate for Leonor, will thwart her personal revenge, grows more insistent in her campaign for the means to vengeance. She manages to wangle Pedro's signet ring from him in Alburquerque's absence, and appears masked in the prison. Attempting to find a weak spot in Leonor's composure, Maria catechizes her. Finally she hits upon the crucial question and demands to know if Leonor repents the life she spent with Alfonso. As soon as Leonor replies, “The life, perhaps, I do regret; the love / Never, O Never,” Maria stabs her. At that moment Alburquerque slams the guard aside, hastening after his revenge. He orders his men to strangle the dying Leonor, but Maria interferes. The two quarrel until Juana, in a pathetic and poignant little line, cries, “Peace, peacel / A little quiet for a parting soul!” Leonor dies, first prophesying downfall for Maria and Alburquerque. The curtain drops on Maria's plaintive, “I know not that I am avenged, at last.”

In addition to his greatly improved ability to order the sequence of action in the plot, Boker's depiction of Leonor displays a more solid grasp of the requirements of Romantic characterization. More than either Anne or Calaynos, she embodies the major traits of a Romantic protagonist. Capable of great emotion, she lives by nature's law. When, in the final act, during the obligatory confessional scene for the prisoner who suspects she will die, the priest asks Leonor, “Hast thou repented of the sinful tie / That bound thee to Alfonso,” her reply captures the final appeal of a soul transfigured by love:

                                                                                                                        I repent
The wrong our union did the hapless queen,
The public scandal of a life like ours,
The charter which we gave to those who sought
Excuses in example; but the tie—
The pure connection of two faithful hearts,
Through the mysterious avenues of love—
Seems holier, something nearer heaven,
Than aught the Church has gathered from above.
There is no creed for this, no law, I own,
Save that which nature whispers in our ears;
And in her whisper, pardon if I thought
I heard the still small voice.

And in that speech Leonor voices the cry of the Romantic heart for some transcendental code of behavior ruled by enduring passion. Leonor's tragedy does not transpire because of the action she undertakes to further the fortunes of her family, but originates in the life she has led with Alfonso. She answers to the retribution sought by those whom her great love wronged. Had she suffered only, her death would have been merely pathetic. Had she embodied but one side of a dual nature, her course would have been less brilliant.

Two other aspects of Boker's playwriting in Leonor exhibit traits that will flower in Francesca: the development of the antagonist and the comic characterizations. Canedo and Coronel, a pair of unlikely courtiers, open Leonor. They grumble about their unwarlike appearance and long for the days before Leonor insisted on proper and sumptuous dress for the court. They banter, quip, quibble, engage in a mock duel, and generally present a humorous, informative, but misleading opening episode. Sighting the funeral column, they hurry to the court and are among the first to desert Leonor when the knowledge of Alfonso's death spreads. In Seville they appear among the townspeople, comment acidly on the commotion when various factions vie for the throne, and side with Alburquerque in the last scene of the play. Their characterizations blend calculation with humor, badinage with a shrewd instinct for self-preservation. When the future will have lived up to Leonor's prophecy, Canedo and Coronel will turn up in the lists of those in power.

As antagonists Maria and Alburquerque both hate Leonor for what she caused them to suffer. Maria, through her driving quest for vengeance, could appear as a persona defined only by that one trait. But Boker shrewdly sets her against her son, Alburquerque, and finally Leonor in a series of scenes that not only present her reasons for jealousy, but also demonstrate her strength in ultimately managing to overcome both king and chancellor to carry out her vendetta. Nothing but brute force can divert a monomania such as Maria's. Alburquerque, on the other side, provides an opponent against whom Leonor can show her mettle. The chancellor's undeniable wiliness, his clever manipulation of king and queen-mother to achieve his ends, make of him an enemy over whom victory comes not easily. Maria represents wronged matrimony, Alburquerque political opposition. Leonor's tragic dimensions stem from her ability to conquer both enemies in different ways. By marrying Juana to Enrique, she exemplifies the Romantic protagonist who forges ahead to fulfill a purpose; in triumphing over Maria she dies tragically because she must pay the ultimate price for her own ethical values while refusing to recant her grand liaison.

IV

While none of Boker's other plays were produced after their initial runs, Francesca da Rimini has stirred enough interest to cause various professionals and amateurs to perform it at widely spaced intervals.²⁸ The play has also received renewed critical attention, along with that recently accorded other cultural phenomena of the nineteenth century. Two recent articles in the Educational Theatre Journal undertake an analysis of Francesca, with divergent results. Paul Voelker approaches the tragedy thematically. He finds:

The thought which the whole structure rests upon is that the aristocratic socio-political system is inherently disastrous to those who live under it. It is, as Pepe suggests, a perversion of the natural order; it is nature turned upside down into a lie as the many lies and deceptions which are necessary to keep it going attest. … The ultimate insidiousness of it all is that those who are in control, even though they may sense the corruption inherent in this reversal of the natural order, are not strong enough to break out and enact a change. In the final analysis, Lanciotto's forehead has been marked by the fruits of this system in more ways than one, and his brain rules his heart at the crucial moment of his life. This is his tragedy.²⁹

Jules Zanger, writing one year after Voelker, interests himself in the daring changes Boker made in the original material. First, the playwright added the element of fraternal love to the traditional story. Moreover, both Lanciotto and Francesca love Paolo who, “loving both, becomes the relatively passive love object, rendered incapable of action by the conflicting passions he feels.” Furthermore, Boker changed Lanciotto from the malformed, jealous villain of legend into the central sympathetic figure in the tragedy. Finally, he created Francesca a figure quite the opposite of the characteristic pursued and passive heroine.

Boker's recreation of Francesca makes her one of the nineteenth century's most vivid and original heroines as she violates both canons of taste and popular concepts of feminine sexuality. These violations lead to her death, but, more poignantly, her tragedy comes from her failure to find in the world of men a love and a single-heartedness equal to her own. As a girl, she agrees to do anything necessary to save her beloved father and Ravenna, but discovers that her father places political considerations before her. As a woman, she is willing to die with her lover or kill for him, but discovers that Paolo's feeling for Lanciotto is at least as strong as his feeling for her.³⁰

Zanger rightly does not intend for his observations to provide a key to the entire tragedy. Yet his insistence upon Francesca's uniqueness among nineteenth-century tragic heroines ignores both Dona Sol, who swears to avenge her father's death, and Leonor, whose acts hardly fall within the pale of acceptable mid-nineteenth-century behavior. But to read Francesca, with Voelker, as a play unified by a political theme narrows its scope considerably. Voelker misemphasizes the mimetic manner in which Boker incorporates politics into the action. He also ignores Boker's avowed literary aims and wider grasp of tragedy. One of the themes may well be the exposure of an aristocracy based upon false social systems that lead to deception—others have to do with the conflict between love and honor (the favorite for nineteenth-century Romantic dramatists), the way in which duplicity in politics does not imbue lives lifted by great love, or the tragic results of placing polity before the heart. Malatesta's decisions to arrange a marriage and send Paolo to Ravenna reflect sound Renaissance politics. Erroneously Guido's decision to deceive Francesca—one occasioned by personal misgivings rather than political considerations—leads to that first leap of the heart when she thinks Paolo her intended husband. But Francesca da Rimini will not be bound by a single interpretation. It is primarily a mimetic tragedy. As such, the actions undertaken by all the major characters are so interlocked that the conclusion occurs inevitably; and those actions arise from a quantum of individualized and dramatic traits so extensive and so well conceived and executed as to provide substance for the divergent themes perceived by various critics.

One effective way to ascertain the most important aspects of Francesca—both as the culmination of Boker's efforts at writing tragedy, and as the best English example of its genre in the nineteenth century—is to proceed quickly to the climax, then work back through the tragedy to evaluate the manner in which Boker manipulates thought, character, and action.

Generally, the plot progresses in seeming leisure until the climactic final act. The first act prepares for the marriage by introducing the major members of the Rimini contingent: Paolo, Lanciotto, their father Malatesta, and Pepe the jester. Lanciotto learns he must marry Francesca, and Paolo departs for Ravenna to fetch her. Act II is set in Ravenna where Paolo and Francesca meet. Not informed to the contrary, she thinks he is Lanciotto and falls in love with him. The third act contains the meeting of Francesca and Lanciotto in Rimini—and her horrified but well disguised reaction to his deformities. The fourth act culminates in the wedding, but not before each of the major characters has been able to reveal his or her innermost thoughts concerning the arrangement. At the end of the act, after Francesca has involuntarily shrunk from her groom's kiss, Lanciotto perceives her grief and refuses to go to her until she can come to love him. Trumpets sound, and he rages off to fight the upstart Ghibelins. The fifth act contains three scenes. In the first Paolo and Francesca walk in the garden reading of Guinevere and Lancelot, then imitate the romance and kiss. Pepe overhears them and, in the second scene, rides to Lanciotto's camp. The soldier does not believe that he has been cuckolded until Pepe, stabbed and dying, shows the dagger he stole from Paolo. The final scene of the play brings Lanciotto to the lovers. The two refuse to assert their innocence, Lanciotto asks Paolo to kill him, and Paolo refuses. Lanciotto than stabs Francesca to provoke Paolo into running him through. When Paolo still will not fight, Lanciotto kills his younger brother.

Boker arranges the climactic camp scene between Pepe and Lanciotto to keep the outcome in doubt, manipulating suspense in a most craftsmanlike fashion. Lanciotto, cooled from the battle, has just planned the next day's campaign. Pepe rides in, and Lanciotto greets him with a quip. Joking and hinting, the jester slowly leads Lanciotto to the subject of Paolo and Francesca. But when questioned he refuses to state anything but the most general of allusions concerning what he overheard. Carefully, aggravating Lanciotto to the point at which he will be susceptible to his information, Pepe prepares. Finally, when Lanciotto agrees to hear out the fool with no interruptions, Pepe launches into a maliciously twisted account of the pathetic love scene on which he eavesdropped.

At this point normal anticipation would have Lanciotto gallop off to avenge his honor. Yet Lanciotto's reply to Pepe's astonished, “Can I not move you?” is a calm, “With such trash as this? / And so you ran ten leagues to tell a lie?— / Run home again.” Lanciotto knows well the malevolence that has too frequently been the source of Pepe's jests. Moreover, as Zanger points out, the great love he feels for Paolo prevents any suspicion from forming. Stung several times before, Lanciotto guards himself against Pepe's viciousness. Pepe, seeking to astound Lanciotto, then describes in lewd detail the actions of the lovers after the kiss. Still Lanciotto refuses to believe, retorting:

You should have been a poet, not a fool.
PEPE.
I might be both.
LAN.
                                                                                          You made no record, then?
Must this fine story die for want of ink?
Left you no trace in writing?
PEPE.
                                                                                                    None.
LAN.
                                                                                                                        Alas!
Then you have told it? 'T is but stale, my boy;
I'm second hearer.
PEPE.
                                                                                You are first, in faith.
LAN.
In truth?
PEPE.
                                                                      In sadness. You have got it fresh.
I had no time; I itched to reach your ear.
Now, go to Rimini and see yourself.
You'll find them in the garden. Lovers are
Like walking ghosts, they always haunt the spot
Of their misdeeds.
LAN.
                                                                      But have I heard you out?
You told me all?
PEPE.
                                                                      All; I have nothing left.
LAN.
Why, you brain-stricken idiot, to trust
Your story and your body in my grasp!

They struggle, and when the fool unsheaths Paolo's dagger Lanciotto stabs him with it. Pepe dies swearing Paolo paid him to kill Lanciotto, indicating the knife as proof. Lanciotto, uncertain at last, calls for his horse and rides to Rimini.

The competent manner in which Boker manipulates doubt, suspicion, and cold guile to build suspense and divert anticipation into surprise bears examination. It demonstrates the playwright's most masterful attainment, combining as it does excellent diction, characterization, and action. Since Pepe, from the first tinkle of his belled cap, intends his sallies to injure, Lanciotto is well advised to disbelieve his wry-told tale. The motivation for Pepe's suicidal task, moreover, rests on his sworn intent to regain honor, slighted earlier when Lanciotto and Paolo struck him for exceeding his fool's license. In an episode early in the third act, Pepe and Lanciotto discuss social justice. They speak as equals, as Voelker points out, concerning the inequities of a social system that sets some people, solely because of birth, above others who have merit. As well as providing a political theme for a portion of the play, the scene adds to Pepe's stature. Without the scene—and Boker's craftsmanship shows best at times like these—Pepe's entire action in Lanciotto's camp would have been beyond what his traits would support as probable. Boker, in that exchange of democratic theory, manages what no other American author of Romantic tragedy did: to treat politics dramatically yet remain within the mimetic framework of characterization and plot progression. Characteristically, Boker has united in one figure—as with Lanciotto—apparently antithetical traits that should not coalesce, to create a lifelike agent. Who would suspect a jest to set in motion the tragedy? Certainly no other fool functions so pivotally. Yet Boker uniquely and appropriately imbues Pepe with an awareness of his natural worth that would have been unconvincing had the whole been less well managed.

We see, in the third act, why Pepe strikes with jests so bitter as to warrant the blows he receives. Yet those very blows, to a less intelligent human being, would not provide adequate motivation for the costly vengeance that ensues. From the moment Lanciotto and Pepe complete their intellectually equal exchange, the fool possesses the stature to avenge the affronts he has received. The humdrum eavesdropping ploy does not distract, for attention focuses on the lovers, then swiftly shifts to Pepe's intention when he appears in Lanciotto's camp. Pepe, who can not convince Lanciotto of his tale without losing his life, works his vengeance. The tragedy moves inevitably to its conclusion.

The inevitability, of course, is strengthened by the brothers' mutual love. From the outset of the play Paolo brooks no comment that does not praise his misshapen but sensitive older brother. Neither fool nor courtier can joke even at Lanciotto's lack of courtliness. Later in the play, even though Paolo has told Francesca nothing of his feelings, so heavily does his love for Lanciotto weigh upon his conscience that guilt renders him practically prostrate. To admit even to himself that he loves his sister-in-law is to betray Lanciotto on the level of trust and honor. Boker, by showing Paolo first and by having him protect his brother from the courtiers' wit, prepares expectations for an unusual Lanciotto.

The second scene reveals Malatesta and Lanciotto discussing their weakened enemies, the Ghibelins. Lanciotto rages against them. And when his father accuses him of cruelty, he remembers a scene from his infancy. His nurse, after her husband had been murdered by some Ghibelin raiders, drew a bloody cross on Lanciotto's forehead invoking an oath: “May this spot stand till Guido's dearest blood / Be mingled with thy own.” The spot flames, his troops report to him, when he is caught up in the heat of battle. Malatesta calls his son moody, informs him of the intended wedding, and overrules Lanciotto's protest that he does not want to marry. As soon as Malatesta leaves, Lanciotto scorns his misshapen body, laughing wryly at the contrast between his own twisted shape and Francesca's reputed beauty. The characterization is essentially complete. In the first speeches, Lanciotto's war-like capacity surfaces. Yet he would ravage Ravenna not for reasons of personal glory, but solely to avenge the injured people of Rimini. In the long second speech, Lanciotto reveals his moodiness and introspective nature.

In the third scene, the soldier, despondent because of his ugliness, toys with his dagger. As he raises it Paolo enters, seizes the weapon, and asks: “Dare you bend / Your wicked hand against a heart I love?” Paolo's first statement indicates the depth of feeling between the brothers. Lanciotto grows more despondent, reviling his humped and limping shape, until Paolo swears he would change with him instantly were it at all possible. Lanciotto then reveals that he fears traveling to Ravenna, for “In Rimini they know me; at Ravenna / I'd be a new-come monster, and exposed to curious wonder.” He asks Paolo to go as his emissary, even offering his brother the match if Francesca pleases him. Malatesta enters, and the brothers convince him that Paolo should go to Ravenna rather than expose Lanciotto to the possibility of capture in the enemy city. Malatesta agrees and the train sets out.

Throughout the third and fourth acts the same nobility of character, introspection, and moodiness play a large part in retaining and magnifying sympathy for Lanciotto. Also, Paolo's love for his brother, his increasing burden of guilt, and Francesca's knowledge that she has “betrayed the noblest heart of all” in not loving her betrothed, combine with Lanciotto's sympathetic traits to intensify the tragedy. The agony of self-doubt that wracks Lanciotto at each development and his sensitivity to Francesca's feelings from their first meeting increase the desperation when, coached by her father, she assures Lanciotto that she truly desires to ratify the peace through a marriage to him. As Voelker notes, politics interfere with honor and love, and the values that work in one sphere can only lead to disappointment and dishonesty in the other. Lanciotto was correct when he told Paolo that only the houses need unite. But he, too, falls in love with Francesca's beauty and sensitive nature. Even after they have been married and Francesca involuntarily shrinks from his kiss, he can not bring himself to insist on a husband's rights. Certain that his ugliness causes her pain, he hurries off to fight the Ghibelins, who have broken the treaty even as the marriage went forward.

No less do Paolo and Francesca feel the despair of their thwarted love. Both intend to act out the parts politics and their parents have set for them. At the outset of the second act, Francesca has prepared herself to accept whoever appears in Ravenna. Guido, her father, assiduously avoids describing Lanciotto, so she falls in love through no fault of her own. She soon learns of the deception and ironically laughs, “Ha! ha! it makes me merry, when I think / How safe I kept this little heart of mine.” Even Paolo can not describe his brother to her, but praises Lanciotto's personality, character, and mind. She thinks the family resemblance must be strong. Neither Paolo nor Francesca admits openly the strength of their emotions. Yet the hesitancy with which each addresses the other indicates the impact of first impressions.

The third and fourth acts intensify their passion. In Act III, when Francesca hears Lanciotto's offer to let her refuse the marriage without affecting the peace she thinks—for a brief moment—that she might be able to follow her heart. In the fourth act, just before the marriage, the two lovers come together. When Francesca demands to know if Paolo agrees to the match, he replies:

… if you press me further, I will say
A word to madden you.—Stand still! You stray
Around the margin of a precipice.
I know what pleasure 't is to pluck the flowers
That hang above destruction, and to gaze
Into the dread abyss, to see such things
As may be safely seen.

By the opening scene of the fifth act, Boker has so intricately interwoven the many lines of characterization and action that no single event can be said to cause the tragedy. As Paolo and Francesca walk in the garden while Lanciotto fights the Ghibelins, the complex interplay of emotions compounds their plight. Both have by now committed themselves to Francesca's marriage primarily because of their feelings for Lanciotto. (Francesca did not recoil from his kiss as much as she shivered because she loved Paolo.) And in the garden, after Francesca has dismissed her all-too-protective maid, they sit close on a bank while Paolo reads the passage in which Lancelot and Guinevere kiss. Unable to resist the suggestion Paolo bends his head to Francesca, and the two declare their love. Although on that grassy bank Paolo initiates the love affair, Francesca, whom Boker creates in the mold of Anne and Leonor, does not comply passively with Paolo's desire but meets him with a strong and vital love. She, even more than he, willingly accepts the inevitability of unfortunate consequences. Paolo experiences the greater agony, and after they have returned to the garden shows little initiative and no joy. What for Francesca is a triumph of passion, justified by her father's deception and by the great love she feels, can only be for Paolo the betrayal of Lanciotto. His love for Francesca differs but in kind from his love for Lanciotto—they equal each other in strength.

When the two, as Pepe forecasts, return to haunt the scene of their first kiss, Paolo reviles himself, while Francesca urges that her mortification will be to face Lanciotto and suffer him in substitute for the man she loves. What would be a trite episode where two lovers recriminate after having consummated their affair becomes, by virtue of Paolo's intense love for his brother, a scene of poignancy. Paolo turns to go and, realizing the futility of trying any longer to retain him, Francesca offers one last kiss. At that moment Lanciotto enters. Seeing him Francesca desperately kisses Paolo, crying, “The last! so be it.”

Paolo and Francesca each admit guilt, but insist on the other's innocence. Lanciotto asks about the dagger and, when Paolo says it was stolen, accepts that as proof of their innocence. Finally, the lovers demand death. Lanciotto replies by offering to fight Paolo, dagger to sword. He refuses. But Francesca, willing to kill for her love, asks in a whisper for Paolo's sword. Driven to desperate measures by honor and his desire to have the brother he loves kill him, Lanciotto stabs Francesca. Paolo rushes at him, but drops his sword, leaving Lanciotto only the recourse of stabbing him. He helps the two dying lovers crawl close to one another and calls for the parents. When Guido cries out in anguish, Lanciotto silences him.

Peace! You disturb the angels up in heaven
While they're hiding from this ugly earth.
Be satisfied with what you see. You two
Began this tragedy, I finished it.
Here, by these bodies, let us reckon up
Our crimes together. Why, how still they lie!
A moment since, they walked, and talked, and kissed!
Defied me to my face, dishonored me!
They had the power to do it then; but now,
Poor souls, who'll shield them in eternity?

After the performances of Francesca George Henry Boker ceased playwriting, with the exception of the closet drama Königsmark, until late in his life. When Lawrence Barrett revived Francesca in 1882, Boker wondered why he had not received such encouragement earlier. Yet most of the plays he wrote between 1847 and 1857 found a producer and a degree of success commensurate with that accorded any but the most wildly popular dramas of the period. He turned away from the stage not because of failure but because other pressures required his attention: his father's business and his activity in the public sector of life.

But the plays he left assure for him a place in the history of American drama. More than any other dramatist writing English verse tragedy during the nineteenth century, Boker developed an ability to wed poetry to a dramatic situation. His early muse was lyric and narrative, but through diligence and observation Boker learned the requirements of the stage. He found the key to production: an exciting story supported by strong characterizations and rhetorically elevated verse. Boker's dramatic achievement culminated in Francesca. None of the plays that followed combined well the many factors necessary to forceful and sensitive tragedy.

Scholars who think Boker undervalued find causes in his contemporaries' neglect of native writers and in the distaste subsequent ages felt for nineteenth-century Romantic verse tragedy.³¹ But other reasons for Boker's moderate position in American literature may be found within the plays themselves. Viewed in relation to similar works by Hugo, Schiller, Ibsen (the saga-dramas), or Shakespeare, none of Boker's tragedies, not even Francesca, manifests comparable complexity of thought and characterization or excellence of dramatic poesy. More important, the tastes of his time demanded an elevated and romantically refulgent stage diction which sounds overly figurative and too highly emotional to the modern ear. The nineteenth century appreciated a rhetorical stage language suitable for actors displaying their declamatory talents. Yet the age moved ever closer to the era of realism, helped along by the superficial conventions of melodrama. Historically, Boker is caught between those two pressures, and like Friedrich Hebbel, seems literarily anachronistic. We do not live far enough from his era to listen with sensibilities tuned to an archaic or foreign diction, nor is Boker's emotional rhetoric and unavoidable sententiousness suitable for rapidly moving stage poetry. Finally, while Boker wrought in Francesca a fast-paced and well turned tragedy, his verse, even when compared to other poetry in the same vein, is fraught with metaphorical overindulgence. Frequently throughout the tragedies, individual scenes or passages soar beyond the capacity of the situation to support them or incorporate an emotional elevation not called for by the action. Alan Woods, who staged the play recently, remarks that his actors had to be taught to rely upon the seemingly overblown language.³² So the tragedies of George Henry Boker continue to be represented by his single highest accomplishment, Francesca da Rimini. The place of this work in the history of American drama is assured; and it is a place well warranted by its author's true literary and dramatic talents, but it is also a place limited by the need for a practicing playwright to suit his diction to those who would speak it.

Notes

1. Joseph Wood Krutch, “George Henry Boker. A Little Known American Dramatist,” Sewanee Review, 25 (1917), 437-458; Arthur Hobson Quinn, “The Dramas of George Henry Boker,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 32 (1917), 233-266; Arthur Hobson Quinn, “George Henry Boker, Playwright and Patriot,” Scribner's Magazine, 71 (1923), 701-715; E. Sculley Bradley, George Henry Boker, Poet and Patriot (1927; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969).

2. Two collections of American drama currently in print include the play: Richard Moody, ed., Dramas from the American Theatre (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), and Arthur H. Quinn, ed., Representative American Plays (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953).

3. Quinn, Plays, p. 315.

4. Quinn, Plays, p. 82.

5. His Marmion (Park Theatre, April 13, 1812) treated earlier the conflict between England and Scotland in a manner that aroused patriotic sentiment during the second war between the U.S. and Great Britain.

6. Forrest made countless thousands from Bird's plays and paid the playwright but ＄3,000 for The Gladiator, Oraloossa, and The Broker of Bogota—plus loaning him ＄2,000. In November 1837, the two fell out over payment for the plays, and Bird, embittered, turned from playwriting to novels. Unlike Boker, he did not have the financial resources to support his creative efforts. Bird died in 1854 at the age of forty-six, exhausted by his efforts. (Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest [New York: Knopf, 1960], p. 169.)

7. Moody, Forrest, p. 170.

8. Conrad wrote it first for A. A. Addams, who, intoxicated, could not appear at the scheduled opening on December 7, 1835. The tragedy premiered two nights later at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, with David Ingersoll taking the lead. (Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama; From the Beginning to the Civil War [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943], p. 253.)

9. Moody, Forrest, p. 198.

10. Quoted in Bradley, p. 79.

11. Bradley, p. 53.

12. The sole exception, Glaucus (completed by January 9, 1886), was written for Lawrence Barrett, who had objected to Boker's earlier version of Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii because the female lead overshadowed the male. That version Boker had called Nydia, and he had composed it between February and April of 1885.

13. Bradley, pp. 344-345.

14. Bradley, p. 123.

15. The preceding information is drawn from Bradley, pp. 343-348.

16. Bradley, p. 51.

17. Bradley, p. 56.

18. Richard H. Stoddard, Recollections, Personal and Literary (New York: A. H. Barnes, 1903), pp. 195-196.

19. See Quinn, “Dramas,” pp. 233-266 for a complete discussion of the differences in the several versions.

20. Bradley also finds at the center of the play the conflict between Calaynos and the social convention (p. 54).

21. Bradley, p. 54; Quinn, History, p. 339.

22. From Quinn, “Dramas,” pp. 233-266.

23. Krutch, “Boker,” pp. 457-458.

24. Bradley, p. 344.

25. Quinn, History, p. 340.

26. Stoddard, p. 184.

27. Marie Taylor and Horace E. Scudder, Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1885), p. 195.

28. As stated previously, Lawrence Barrett and Otis Skinner revived the play late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries. In 1959 the University of Chicago hosted a summer production in an outdoor quadrangle containing a fountain (seen by the author), and in 1972 the University of Southern California staged a costumed and memorized readers' theatre version in an arcaded patio. Alan Woods, “Producing Boker's Francesca da Rimini,” Educational Theatre Journal, 24 (1972), 396-401.

29. Paul Voelker, “George Henry Boker's Francesca da Rimini: an Interpretation and Evaluation,” Educational Theatre Journal, 24 (1972), 395.

30. Jules Zanger, “Boker's Francesca da Rimini, the Brothers' Tragedy,” Educational Theatre Journal, 25 (1973), 414, 416.

31. Quinn, History, p. 363 f.

32. Woods, pp. 396-401.